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On the second day of BlackBerry World 2012, Heins discussed RIM's focus and its need for more of it. Since he first joined the company four years ago, RIM has grown from a 6,000-plus-person company to being more than 20,000 employees strong.

"With that kind of growth, it becomes easy to lose efficiency. Everything becomes something you want to pursue because everything is so exciting," said Heins during a May 2 meeting with reporters. He added, "Now, RIM has a little fat on the hips and we need to be lean, mean."

Some slimming down certainly occurred in January when Heins replaced longtime co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis. RIM now plans to "line everything up" under just one chief operating officer, and to hire a top-gun marketing person.

Further reading

Heins also, and arguably effectively, pushed the ideas that RIM's inability to deliver in recent quarters was due to internal inefficienciesboth the bloat of extra people and of a need for consensus; too many meetings but too few people making decisions and the tough but necessary decision to pursue a new platform, the culmination of which will be BlackBerry 10. With its new Dev Alpha smartphones, the new platform will arrive later this year.

To the first point, Heins said that company morale is up.

"People needed focus," he explained, in a comment attached to a "misunderstanding" that followed RIM's most recent earnings call. Some media outlets reported that RIM was getting out of the consumer game to focus on its enterprise customers.

"That is absolutely not true: RIM is not leaving the consumer business," Heins said, explaining that there were "many things on the consumer side that were nice to do but not core to the business." There are things that are nice to have, such as gaming and mapping, but these are not core to the business and so are areas best addressed through relationships.